Faith & Evolution- At loggerheads or not?
Why this question at the first place? But before an attempt is made to answer this, first some…
Are you the author of this article @oneway ?
This is a very long article. Could have been more concise. Parts of it are very good. And, then some parts veer into weird pseudo-science.
Let me summarize the good parts and leave some brief comments.
What the article is saying is,
Science is the study of natural objects through observation and experimentation
Theology is the study of the divine.
The divine is not a natural object that can be observed.
Hence, the study of the divine is not within the domain of science.
Faith is the belief in the statements about the divine in spite of not being able to observe the divine directly.
Scientists exceed their bounds when they make statements about the divine.
Theologians exceed their bounds when they make statements about natural objects.
Science does a good job of debunking these fake scientific statements by theologians.
All this is excellent and should not be conflated with the weird stuff in the rest of the article.
Some comments,
It is true that scientists exceed their bounds when they make statements about the divine.
But, the root cause is that some theologians (not the great ones) present the concept of the divine as a natural object (Supreme Being) whose actions can be directly observed.
This brings them in the domain of science and the scientists do a good job in debunking this false concept of the divine as an object.
But, scientists then go further and deny that there is any reality that cannot be observed. Here they are engaging in bad theology and should be debunked by genuine theologians
The theory of evolution is a result of observation of natural objects and is considered to be consistent with the observed facts.
This is entirely within the bounds of science.
The conflict with faith occurs when theologians also claim to make statements about the same natural processes without any observation or experimentation.
Here the theologians are exceeding their bounds.
But there should be no conflict with true theologians who realize that since the divine is not an object that can be directly observed any statement about the divine must be symbolic.
Hence, the story of Creation, for example, can only be understood symbolically and not as a series of natural events that can be verified by observation.